Hillary and the OODA Loop

John Boyd was a fighter pilot and a military theorist. His contribution to military theory is the OODA Loop, an acronym for "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act." It's Boyd's basic outline of how human beings interact with their environment.

Boyd's idea, which is now basic American military doctrine, is that quick actions can be used to disorient and confuse the enemy by, as fighter pilots say, "getting inside his decision cycle." In air-to-air combat, it means starting a second maneuver before the other guy has reacted to your first. (Think of a wide receiver on a football field faking left and cutting right.) It means piling action on action in rapid succession until the other guy hasn't got a clue what's coming next and hesitates, making it possible to swoop in for the kill.

The misinformation and even lies are flying out of Camp Clinton on a daily basis: misquotes of his praise for President Reagan, mischaracterizations of his position on the war, outlandish insinuations about his religious background. Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the Hillary haters imagine it to be pathology. It isn't. It's a well executed plan. I'd bet cash money there's someone in Hillary Clinton's campaign who's a student of John Boyd.

Clinton is getting inside Obama's OODA Loop and it's working. He's so busy reacting to yesterday's slur he's not reacting well to today's, and then when he shifts gear to today's the Clintons will be on to tomorrow's. They've got him shooting at shadows, and that feeds the Clintons' narrative about Obama not being ready to be President. He looks indecisive, disoriented, brittle -- and he never seems to have a moment to deliver the message that won for him in Iowa.

The daily misinformation plays into the news cycle. It gives Chris Mathews and the rest something fresh to chatter about every day. They roll their eyes and sneer at Clinton's sleazy tactics, and they take pains to let Obama refute the disinformation, which he does. But the result is that they're letting Hillary control the campaign. The result is a punch-drunk Obama never seeming to get any traction.

If I were Obama's campaign, I'd make the OODA Loop strategy a part of the narrative. I'd set up a viral website documenting the lie of the day. I'd start every morning with a "what's it going to be today, Hillary?" multiple choice raffle. I'd make it so that the next time she or one of her surrogates tells a lie about me, my reaction to it is to give someone a toaster for coming closest to predicting what the lie was going to be. I'd let the web-savvy wiseguys on my staff make the whole thing a joke, and I'd get back to delivering my own message.

John Boyd had a standing offer for every other fighter pilot in the world: That in an air-to-air battle he could get behind them -- in a kill position -- in 40 seconds or less. A lot of pilots took him up on the challenge, but none ever beat him. Boyd was the master of the OODA Loop, and he taught everyone a new set of rules: that their only chance was to break out of the decision cycle and start anew, to focus on quickness not speed.

That's what Obama needs to do. We'll see if he does.

Comments

[Squidley]

I don't know what "outlandish insinuations" the lyingest liars are making about Obama's religious background, but I do know this: the church that he is currently a member of is an Afrocentric hotbed of black racial consciousness. It advocates "black" ethics and "black" values, and identifies itself with Africa, not America. The only things it has to say about America are in reference to slavery (absent for more than a century), segregation (gone for more than a generation), and "racism" (black racism being far more prevalent in modern America than white racism). It's little more than the Nation of Islam ideology repackaged in "Christian" clothing.

This site offers a precis of their views, and this is its "About Us" page.

No white candidate would get a pass for belonging to such an openly race-conscious, even racist church. Why does Obama get a free ride?

[Wally]

John Boyd sounds like a real-life Mazer Rackham

[Frank]

What? You mean the Clinton campaign is playing dirty? Even lying? I would never have thought something like this would happen, because we all know it's the evil rethuglicans that do the dirty campaigning. The same evil people who pointed out all these same types of activities from Hill-Billy in '92 and all throughout the Clinton presidency.

But they all just hated Clinton. The Clintons were never opportunistic power seekers until they started attacking another Democrat. Before that it was all the VRWC.